Management by Baseball

What do Hall of Fame baseball managers like Connie Mack & John McGraw have in common with today's business leaders? Why are baseball managers better role models for management than corporate heroes like Jack Welch, Jamie Dimon & Bill Gates? And just what does Peter Drucker have to do with Oriole ex-manager Earl Weaver?
Management consultant & ex-baseball reporter Jeff Angus shows you almost everything you need to know about management you can learn from Baseball.

Monday, July 25, 2005

MBB Summarized in 60 Secondsby KOMO's Brian Calvert

It takes a heck of a talent to squeeze the key points of MBB into 60 seconds. No one's ever done a better job than KOMO-AM 1000's reporter, Brian Calvert. He broadcast the story this morning.

If you read this weblog regularly, you won't learn much MBB from the clip, but you will get the pleasure of observing an effective reporter/editor in action. Calvert's story is &nbsphere, and there's a link to the audio on that page.

7/25/2005 12:41:00 PM posted by j @ 7/25/2005 12:41:00 PM

Sunday, July 24, 2005

Steady As She Goes: ManagingGoals & Objectives, Pedro Martí­nez Style

A chronic weakness of large organizations in working towards
goals and objectives is the subtle skill of finding the right point in the
Preplanning<-->Flexbibility continuum. It's only a small
surprise, then, that the New York Mets' Pedro Martínez, the most
accomplished pitcher of his generation & this season's
leading starter (Composite ERA of 1.48, 10% better than the
closest also-ran, Roger Clemens) is an example non-baseball
managers should follow in how to find that point.

STANDARD FLOP-ERATING PROCEDURE
The chronic weakness usually results in one of two opposite
extremes in approach or course of action. This is the result of a
simplistic, almost autistic response to nuanced situations that
results in Binary Thinking (many bad managers are binary
thinkers; all decisions produced from binary
thinking are bad, though not all bad decisions result in bad
outcomes). Binary Thinking is prevalent among those who like to
or need to simplify options, and the kinds of people who ascend
to positions of executive power tend to possess the ability to
strip things down to simple (or simplistic) models, avoiding
analysis paralysis.

Binary thinking is where the decisionmaker views things as
having two opposite possibilities, and no others. Nuance tends to
be winnowed out for the binary thinker. What channel shall I
distribute through...direct or indirect? Is Jacques Chirac good
or evil? Should I plant soybeans or sorghum? Should I expand our
markets or look for a buyer? Shall I consumer 950 claories a day
or not bother to diet at all?

Binary thinkers are mentally and usually physically
uncomfortable in the grey areas (and almost all the best possible
decisions are grey areas).

PEDRO'S EVEN KEEL
Pedro Martínez' approach is well within the grey zone, neither
rational exuberance nor refusal to celebrate victories. Yesterday
the Mets won with Pedro on the mound, moving their record to
50-47, 4-½ games out of first in the very tight NL East race.
According to today's New York Times game story by Joe LaPointe, Pedro...

said the Mets seemed to be
improving as a group. He suggested that October was the time
for bragging, after teams had proved all their skeptics
wrong.

"You'll see me dancing around after we do what we have
to do," Martínez said.

Great baseball teams are good at maintaining this even keel,
never getting overly-cocky and dismissive of their opposition,
never coming apart at the seams in the face of a losing streak or
losing a star player to injury. The great Baltimore Orioles teams
during the Weaver era were as good as any franchise at this
"talent", and when you went into their clubhouse after
a game, you couldn't usually tell the difference in their
demeanor between the days they won and the days they lost. If
they won, they wore an air of that's what we get paid to do.
If they lost, their demeanor was Okay we're better but we got
beaten, we gotta/are going to win tomorrow.

Pedro seems to have found the positive middle ground,
respecting and enjoying the fruits of the win to the degree it
merits and not pretending it's either of the two binary
possiblities a bad manager might: an omen that means they got the
pennant cinched or an essentially meaningless game in July that
because two of the three teams above them in the standings won
their games as well.

Managers in non-baseball organizations need to avoid the
binary extremes, the Bob Dole Generation pattern of withholding
praise (because if you stop kicking their axes, they'll stop
trying) or the warm unrelenting ego-massaging of the Norman
Vincent Peale positive-thinker. Non-baseball managers find the
positive inspirations of the victories they get along the way
while still looking for what can be improved. They need to
analyze the events as part of pattern, too, looking for what
worked and why, what didn't and why, and how those factors
interplayed along the way, so they can recognize patterns and
improve their own performance.

There's an extra Pedro Martínez lesson to learn from the same
story, an attitude high-achieving managers usually have.

PEDRO'S SITING STAR
Martínez navigates his career, his way of competing, by
maintaining respect for his teammates and other crafts that
complement his own. The "normal" attitude, a little
more frequent among talented people is that the things they do
well are important, and other things are less important. More
damaging, sometimes people with that attitude allow themselves to
believe because they don't do those things well, they
must not be important. I see a lot of underachieving managers who
disappoint relative to their obvious skill, because they
undervalue other aptitudes they don't have, or simply ignore them
without judging them.

Pedro's conduct is very different. As it played out in the
Times story:

Martínez, who raised his
record to 12-3 despite having trouble gripping the ball and
giving up five runs, became animated when discussing (Met
shortstop José) Reyes. Both are from the Dominican Republic.
Martínez is 11 years older than Reyes and is a mentor to
him.

"I become a fan at that moment when José Reyes is
running the bases," Martínez said. "I wish I was
him." Martínez said that in his next life, he wanted to
come back with Reyes's abilities and play shortstop.

Martínez is not just focused on the importance of pitching.
He sees it as part of a system. He takes the time to be a mentor
(not an essential part of his job description) and he respects
other skill sets, so much that when he sees skill at a very
different one, he respects it enough to observe it and to wish he
could do it himself.

Managers who achieve persistently respect and observe other
departments, disciplines, talents, aptitudes, crafts, all looking
for an edge or for deeper understanding of their environment. By
encompassing knowledge about functionally attached workgroups
there's a good chance they can refine how their own group works
to the benefit of the overall system.

Pedro Martínez isn't just an exceptionally good pitcher. He's
a Polaris for productive management insights.

7/24/2005 12:17:00 PM posted by j @ 7/24/2005 12:17:00 PM

Wednesday, July 20, 2005

The Competitive IntelligenceSecrets of Ray Miller

Non-baseball organizations in competitive fields, like their
baseball cousins, have competitive intelligence (CI) departments.
In baseball, that's the advance scouting function that sends
individuals to observe upcoming opponents play, tracking
individual and team tendencies, seeking weaknesses they can
exploit, charting managerial decisions, and then reporting it
back to the team.

In large business or government organizations, there is
usually a formal CI department or specific jobs that have the
responsibility for it (think product marketing manager in a
software company, for example).

Baseball is much more capable & effective than other
industries, though, because to some degree, it makes CI
everyone's responsibility, pushing it out beyond the dedicated
advance scouting group. Some players invest energy trying to
steal signs, others hang out with opponents near the batting cage
before games.

Non-baseball organizations, especially in the business and
professional services world, would be wise to copy baseball's
unusually broad CI efforts.

MILLER'S CI METHOD
Ray Miller, the legendary pitching coach for the Baltimore
Orioles, uses a method that's uncommon even in CI-rich baseball.
Beyond even combing through his pitching-coach peers' (the
logical "competitors") wisdom for lessons, he went
straight to the enemy for intel. As he says, "I learned more
about coaching pitching from listening to hitters than listening
to anyone else".

When Frank Robinson, one of the 15 greatest career
hitters of all time, became a coach with the Orioles in 1980,
Miller sought him out. "I talked pitching to him, he talked
hitting to me," Miller explained. The pitching coach noted
how similar the mechanics are, that looking at the mechanics of
the other side gave you a little extra perspective. And, of
course, Frank Robinson knew a lot of pitching, what was easy to
read and what made his job harder, and all of that external
(competitor) wisdom added an uncommon perspective to Miller's
understanding.

That kind of approach (I'm no suggesting it alone,
but that type of search for additional, related perspective) is a
significant part of what has made Miller extraordinarily
successful, with three Cy Young award winners and seven 20-game
winners to his credit.

BEYOND BASEBALL
Organizations in competitive fields should consider encouraging
everyone to explore CI as a sideline as baseball does. Different
people bring different backgrounds and experiences to their
perceptions, making possible delivery of different insights. True, not all will be useful, but that's true of
dedicated, trained CI department specialists, too. And having
everyone rolling up their sleeves and doing some level of CI work
together, even a small amount, increases social cohesion,
reinforces the us-v-them drift that, in measured quantities,
boosts organizational torque.

And consider, too, Miller's CI Method. You can always talk
with mutual customers or prospective customers, talk to
industry-watchers, but consider a Miller: go to trade association
meetings and query your peers at competitors directly. Listen to
them talking with their peers, analyse their world view and
responses to things.

Your dialogue with direct competitors, especially your peer
equivalent in that organization, is a powerful CI gathering tool.
Too few people do it, probably out of fear. But then too few
people succeed, too.

MILLER ADDENDUMMiller has an usual curriculum vitae, and we'll take
advantage of his wisdom for a few other lessons later. He has
gone from pitching coach to manager to pitching coach to manager to
pitching coach, a path few baseball management folk have had, and
an equivalent path fewer outside of baseball have had.
Unsurprisingly, he has a lot of interesting and uncommon insights
he was willing to share.

7/20/2005 07:06:00 PM posted by j @ 7/20/2005 07:06:00 PM

Wednesday, July 13, 2005

Thurs, July 14 - University Book Store Event Management by Baseball Book

Thursday evening at 7 p.m., I'm going to be reading and discussing with attendees the book Management by Baseball - A Pocket Reader at the University Book Store in Seattle.

Sunday, July 10, 2005

Doug Glanville's Polymathic Path to Empyrean Enlightenment

Large organizations recruiting for a key position seek stars
-- people who just have powerful charisma and overwhelming force
of skill, accomplishment and alpha-dog personality. As in
baseball, when you find a Reggie Jackson or Roger Clemens, that's
great, because no matter what their personal shortcomings or
bumpy stretches, they just elevate your entire organization's
prospects. All organizations recognize the value of Reggies &
Rogers.

Since they seek Reggies and Rogers with such passion,
recruiters and scouts frequently fall into a MBWT (Management by
Wishful Thinking) pattern, taking someone who on the surface kind
of seems like a Reggie or Roger but who is all hat and
no cattle. The swagger, unaccompanied by applied accomplishment,
is just Potemkin leadership, and, more often than not, is worse
than nothing -- the final box score more often than not shows a
negative result from thrusting an ersatz talent into the mix.

Then there's Doug Glanville.

While few large organizations know it or choose to act on it
if they do, all of them need some Doug Glanvilles, people who,
even though they don't have close to Reggie Jackson caliber
talent, elevate everyone's abilities through broad interests,
multi-disciplinary involvement & emotional intelligence. You
can't build a team around such individuals, they can't be your
"franchise player", they are just catalysts, key parts all
successful organizations in competitive fields have on hand.
Organizations that suppress the natural connecting abilities
their Glanvilles have will find it hard to excel.

POLYMATHS ON PARADE
Highly-studious, blessed with highly-educated parents and
highly-educated himself, verbally-adept at a couple of standard
deviations above the baseball player norm, Glanville's path to
the elite-talent world of the majors began as a five year old when he started playing
a baseball simulation (Strat-O-Matic, specifically) along
with Wiffle Ball, so his baseball education blended mind and
body both. Simulations are wonderful training tool, especially
good ones. They teach a student of them some of the obvious
foundations of what they're simulating, and that does several
things:

It provides a framework on which to
hang additional, more refined, information,

It simplifies, at the cost of a
little creativity, decision-making by making
"automatic" certain components of decisions,
freeing the actor to focus more attention to other areas,

It supports experimentation and
gathering experience at no risk to actual operations, by
allowing the actor to find out certain approaches almost
always fail.

SIDE NOTE: I've used simulations, particularly the urban planning sim "Sim City" as a test for job candidates. It's a powerful technique for exposing people's analytical and personality differences. I'll write about that in depth some other time.

Glanville found it easy (as his ilk always do) to slip between
different levels of the hierarchy. As a degreed engineer with a
background in transportation planning, he went to his team's front
office to give them unsolicited counseling in transportation
topics around the design and delivery of their new stadium. He
was only a back-up outfielder, but he was fearless in sharing his
knowledge with his "superiors" in an organization in
which he knew more than anyone else about a subject.

BENEFITS NOT LIMITED BY JOB DESCRIPTION
The benefits of a Doug Glanville extend beyond the immediate
skills required by their job description. Glanville, who retired
during this season, will not be remembered as legendary by casual
fans for his play.

He had a sweet season in 1999, but really, he was a two-tool
player with a merely-adequate major league career. He was a
defensive specialist at a skill position. His fielding was
consistently good statistically -- better than league average
range every year but one and better than league average in errors
every year but one. About a career 90th percentile
center fielder.

He was an excellent baserunner and a very good base-stealer,
with an 83% success rate, above the 80th percentile career for
modern baseball stealers with that many attempts.

But his value transcended the numbers.

He was a player representative, using his
communciation and self-described "nerd" skills to
educate his fellow staffers about rules and regulations and
industry trends. He was and is active in the community, bringing
his fellow staffers into contact with the organization's
customers. He was a talker in the clubhouse, being a joker and
keeping people loose. Even in his retirement announcement, a time
that would be sad for most, he milked it for laughs, arranging to have a
one-day contract with his hometown team, the Phillies, and
suggesting it was signed in invisible ink.

People who work in organizations without Glanvilles miss out
on knowledge, connections and the ability such contributors have
to break up stress and the mistakes that result from stress.

Large organizations are always better off with a lot of
Reggies and Rogers than none. The error they tend to make is if
they can't find superstar talent, they fall into the error of
taking a chance on someone who really isn't one but who looks
like he or she just might be.

Usually, they're far better off with a Doug. That talent at
connecting people reinforces healthy habits and transcends the
immediate stats they can put up. As long as the Doug is adequate,
large organizations are better off with a Doug than a Potemkin
Roger.

Thursday, July 07, 2005

It's not just that the Devil Rays have the most losses of any
team in the majors. It's not that they trail the 29 other teams in numerous pitching
and offensive categories.

Just to put the icing on the cake, as an organization, they
have the worst tin ear for marketing of any profit-making
organization since the Seattle Mariners in the late 70's allowed
a schizophrenic 40-something man to have, during a scheduled
game, a try-out for team mascot dressed in nothing more than a
giant diaper held together with a giant safety pin and,
ambulating on all fours for hundreds of yards until the
artificial turf lacerated his hands and legs so badly he
collapsed and almost bled out next to the first-base coach's box.

The Devil Rays' ownership (I gotta think this is the
ownership, and not the marketing department) have instituted an
innovation that gives innovation a bad name. If you read this
weblog much, you know I'm militantly pro-experimentation. But
Russian Roulette with five bullets, what the Devil Rays are
doing, is not conventional thinking for a heck of a good
reason...it's got a benefit/cost ratio so low, it's beyond not
worth trying. It's destructive.

They get massive influxes of cash from MLB's
revenue-sharing plan, $20 million from last season, for
example.

This is not a team that's suffering
financially, nor one, based on the minor league players in its
system (and on its major league roster), suffering for a lack of
future talent.

From a marketing perspective, they really do need to
be focused, and build their positioning as an entertainment
choice, build baseball awareness in young people, and be all
about baseball. They don't need to beg poverty or
diminish clarity among game attendees about why they're at
the ballpark: the overarching theme is entertainment, fun and
entertainment.

¿So why the frell are they hawking furniture in a primary
stadium entrance?

According to a story from the South Florida
Sun-Sentinel (thanks, Baseball Primer), it's this very
chair-raising, sofa-the-little-children, just-say-yes-to-rugs
madness that has gripped the Devil Rays, marketing household
goods to people seeking out entertainment.

They're not the same thing. If they were, every Levitz would
have a batting cage, every Ethan Allen (not him...him) really good
sight lines, every Dania a video rental stand. People are not in
hard-goods mindset at the ballgame, and if they are, they shouldn't
be...the team has failed. Furniture retailing undermines the experience-as-fun, puts customers into a
serious, nesting space.

There are probably lots of things you could sell at a stadium
entrance that would be silly. But household furnishings are way
beyond silly -- they simply run totally counter, 180 degrees from
what you're trying to deliver.

BEYOND BASEBALL
It's really important to be flexible in taking on new products,
to be open to ways you might manufacture or sell something
seemingly different that adds to your capabilities or knowledge
or customer goodwill or that slipstreams products you're already
selling without having to add staff proportionally or a
half-dozen other reasons.

Buckman Labs, for example, is in the chemicals business, but
one of their main products is information about
chemicals and their use. Their customers can tap into Buckman's
expertise not only on Buckman's products, but competitors' as
well. It's a different business, but it's related.

There are pizza delivery chains that sell and/or rent videos
along with the food on the menu. Different, but makes use of the
same distribution effort and the customer is the same. It doesn't
confuse the customer -- the evening-at-home becomes a package
deal.

A consultant in Texas who I used to work with had a client
that was in the food processing business. When the price of oil
flagged (yeah, that dates this one, doesn't it?) a lot of
business and family spending contracted and the processor's
customers were applying the old price squeeze on them. The owner, logically, hoped to expand into a higher-margin business. A wholesaler
of golf equipment and accessories across town went under in the
contraction and the owner of the food processor, a rabid golf
enthusiast mortgaged his house and bought the distribution
business. Different line of work, different customers, different
field, different expertise required. It took the food processor's
owner five months to go out of business, but he was able to live
in his house for another four before he lost it.

There was the Northwest company that sold very high-end
corporate computer equipment, ultra-high performance hardware for
network storage. As margins in the category wilted, they decided
to expand into new lines. The choice, office supplies. The
rationale was "our customers buy computer hardware from us, and
the same companies buy office supplies (true), so we can get them
to buy their office supplies from us" (false). Bloodbath. They had
no expertise in office supplies, nothing innovative to peel
existing customers away from their existing suppliers, and the
buyer/purchasing authority for one line is rarely the same human as for the other line in any
organization big enough to make a difference to a seller.

I'm thinking the Devil Ray logic is the parallel to the
computer equipment/office supply one (I'm holding on for dear
life to the idea it wasn't completely random): The people who
come to our ballpark to see baseball also buy furniture
sometimes, therefore, we can get them to buy divans and futons
from us.

This is really poor marketing. As I said earlier, blending
ideas aren't bad in themselves, but a blending idea not
thought-out is likely to stumble.

The Devil Rays aren't starved for money, they're starved for
on-field success. The business of baseball comes down to the game
and the entertainment/fun related to playing it and watching it
played, and being in a place with other people who are being
entertained. The Rays' customers (fans) are starved for on-field
success. In the absence of on-field success, there is only fun to
offer.

Instead, the Rays are offering their fans serious hard goods,
major purchases, Divans of Doom, muddying the escapist fantasy of
being at the ballpark with the domestic seriousness of furniture.
Bad, irrevocably lousy, legendarily tone-deaf marketing.

If we're lucky, in his next dispute with an ump Lou Piniella
will eschew pulling up first base and tossing it, instead
grabbing a rasher of bar stools and spraying them around the
infield, Extreme Makeover: Tropicana Edition-style.

Friday, July 01, 2005

Most people think that coaching and mentoring in non-baseball
organizations is about people management (Second Base in the MBB
Model). In reality, it's a lot more about the other three bases.

To get the most value out of the staff you have, you have to
reshape job descriptions and tasks to match the aptitudes of the
talent you have on your staff, real First Base
skills. Where you don't have the skills in place, you have to
grow them, picking staffers to expand into those areas based on
their available time and existing aptitudes. There are almost no
cases where you can escape coaching or training or mentoring and
are getting the most out of your team.

But here's the secret: These are all amazingly fecund
opportunities for learning as well. As Angus' Twelfth Law states:
"Everyone knows some things you don't. Inevitably, a few of
those things will be both worth knowing and applicable
later".

As the New York Mets highly-successful pitching coach Rick
Peterson said recently, "All great teachers are great
students". Peterson, as I've mentioned before, infuses knowledge throughout every level of the organization he works with, creating a common set of customized tools to further the craft of the pitching and catching talent, a common set of tools with which to view and dissect the craft.

TEACHER LEARNING FROM THE BESTWhen the Mets acquired Pedro Martínez, (in my opinion the premier
pitcher of his generation, and certainly the best starting pitcher so far this season)
Peterson sought him out and tried to acquire lessons from him
right away. That part is pretty obvious: Martínez is not only a
monster talent, but appears to have a monster ego, too (few
humble 'aww shucks' guys seem to make successful major league
starters). No matter how great Peterson's standing as a coach,
this particular pitcher is coming into a new organization after
feeling bruised by his previous one & taking on as his home
city one that has shown him a truckload of derision and
hostility. The coach coming to the pitcher as a peer and offering
to learn and discuss opens up a positive communication channel,
stripped of most emotional baggage. Sure, any great teacher can
be a great student when his student is such a master of
the arts. When the time comes for the teaching to flow the other
way though, the pipeline is already open, the dialogue engaged.

Too often in management practice beyond baseball, the manager
is afraid to put himself in a learning rôle, but if he does,
he's missing out and probably losing much his own chance to grow.
One of the best ways to learn about the staffer's learning style
and the knowledge and skills she brings to the mix is to try to
get her to teach you something. You can ask in a straightforward,
not submissive but interested way -- if the new staffer is
capable of healthy behavior, you'll benefit every time (and if
the new staffer isn't capable of healthy behavior, why are you
still cutting that staffer a paycheck?).

Peterson and the Mets have a rigorous, organization-wide
system of methods and techniques based on a deep toolbox but with
most tools customized to individuals' aptitudes. But it's not
static, rigid and therefore brittle. When the Mets bring up or
acquire a new pitcher and Peterson starts working with him, he
strives to integrate the pitcher into the team's "learning
environment", a place where everyone gets to learn and the
coach gets to learn from the students, too. The knowledge he
acquires is something he may use only to help that individual,
but more importantly, he may use it tweak the overall
organizational plan to everyone's benefit. On the surface,
Peterson's learning environment will appear to some casual
observers as a Second Base method as I mentioned
earlier, that is, learning about an individual to manage her
better or making the staffer feel like part of the group so as to
integrate him better. And it certainly leads to those immediate
benefits in most cases.

ROUNDING THIRDBut every bit of knowledge we acquire, whether from the
butt-crack idiot savant who maintains the computer network or the
woman who sorts the mail in the mail-room is something that can
add immediate perspective or be something we can draw on later as
part of an overall tack. And by opening yourself up to these
kinds of non-traditional information, you have a chance to find
out something about yourself and the intellectual or emotional
baggage you limit yourself with, that is, the Third Base
skill set.

It sounds funny to admit, but the greatest workplace epiphany
I ever had about one of my own self-imposed limitations was from
a 16-year old U.S. Senate summer intern, one of a group of them I
was managing. Because she was an adolescent, was intelligent but
inexperienced in the organizational pressure cooker, she hadn't
had her observational skill plaqued over with "shoulds"
and "can'ts". She just came right out and mentioned to
me that I would always be disappointed in my life because I
always set myself reasonable ambitions (because when you fail to
reach your reasonable ambitions, you feel cheated or perhaps a
failure, but if your ambitions are shoot-the-moon, it's easier to
take not achieving them in stride because you know they were
aiming very high). My Calvinist way of doing things was just
programmed, invisible to me, and I couldn't change it until she
made it visible. And leaving that behind has been incredibly
valuable to me personally and moreso in my management.

If you are open to getting knowledge or insight from the
lowliest line worker, you'll be plenty open to getting it from
everyone else. It doesn't have to be a Pedro Martínez. Just the
fact that he or she is are an outsider and not yet used to your
approach gives that newcomer an outside perspective that might
reward you.

Finally, the strategic benefit of the Rick Peterson learning
environment is at Home Plate in the MBB Model --
Change, and this is completely critical in a competitive field.
Because as you accumulate individuals' insights, learn the tools
and techniques they have been taught previously or just
synthesized themselves, no matter how productive or even
award-winning your own systems are, there's a decent chance you
can add to or tune your systems.

Every tool in your toolbox is something you might use later.
It means your system is evolving. Once your competitors have
decoded what you do (and trust me, if you're successful, some
will to at least a surface degree), they will start imitating or
replicating some of the management DNA from you. If you're a
learning organization, you are in constant prevolution and that
means what they are imitating is what you did last year while you
have moved on and aren't doing that any more. Eighty-five percent
of large organizations are incapable of change, and even the 10%
that are capable of decoding and replicating in a useful way
others' changes are going to have a hard time competing with you
if you manage change effectively. There's no bigger competitive
advantage than that.

So the approach Rick Peterson and his associates have diffused
through the New York Mets' organization touches all the bases
like an invigorating game-winning home run. And please note what
the learning environment has done for Martínez -- perhaps his
second best season ever, and this after many teams considering
his free agency were concerned he might be used up. Look at his
month-by-month consistency:

Split

W

L

ERA

GS

IP

H

R

HR

HBP

BB

K

Home

4

1

2.67

9

64.0

41

20

5

0

15

63

Away

5

1

2.82

7

51.0

31

16

4

1

7

60

Apr

2

1

2.75

5

36.0

18

11

1

0

6

46

May

3

0

2.83

5

35.0

21

12

4

1

6

37

June

4

1

2.66

6

44.0

33

13

4

0

10

40

Not just excellence, but with a consistency that's remarkable
-- not that he hasn't had four weaker results spread
out over the 16 -- just that the rolling average is very smooth,
and he's more than just cashing in on the advantages pitchers
have in the Mets' pitcher-friendly home stadium.

While the organization's biggest overall gains from a learning
environment usually come from elevating average performers
(¿because how much room does someone like Pedro's game have to
elevate?), it stands to ratchet up everybody's game.

What do you have to change in yourself to make a Rick Peterson
style learning environment happen in your group? And what external
barriers are you going to start removing or eroding today?